As consumer use of digital video on personal computers (PCs) and consumer electronics devices grows, traditional video editing solutions are proving to miss the true needs of the users. A major problem is the complexity of the editing task and the resulting complexity of the user interface required to perform it. This complexity is both a significant barrier to use and prevents editing from being performed in the consumer electronic-style user experience scenario (TV and remote control) that is gaining importance in the PC industry.
Recently a number of products have been introduced that try to reduce the complexity of the editing task, examples include Sony's MovieShaker, Microsoft's MovieMaker 2.0, and Muvee's AutoProducer. All of these products provide some degree of automated editing, where the software analyzes the video and audio content and makes editing decisions based on a set of editing rules.
Current automated editing products typically use editing rules that embody a domain of knowledge that is normally beyond that of even most avid video editing enthusiasts. The editing rules are commonly based on color and motion analysis of the video and pitch and rhythm analysis of the audio.
However, these automated editing engines do not understand the meaning of the video and audio. This lack of understanding can be easily shown by the example of a wedding video. When editing a wedding video, one would not want to eliminate the scene where the bride and groom say ‘I do’, nor would you want to insert a cut in the audio between the words ‘I’ and ‘do’. Yet this is exactly what the current state of the art might edit because the analysis of the video and audio does not understand the importance of this scene to the viewer.
One approach to solving this problem, as implemented in the MGI Cinemagic and Microsoft MovieMaker software, is to allow the user to post-edit the automated results. This allows the user to correct for these inevitable errors in the automated process. However, this approach is fundamentally flawed because, by performing manual editing as a second step, many of the positive attributes of the automated process (such as synchronization of music and video edits) are lost. In addition, this approach re-introduces conventional video editing into the user experience and interface, eliminating the possibility of a consumer-electronics style solution.
Thus, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.